Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Sunday is Texas Independence Day. Over the last decade I’ve managed to acquire several vintage Texas community cookbooks as well as several other Texas-related cookbooks from businesses such as the Imperial Sugar Company.

It’s possible that I’m overcompensating for having moved here from Michigan by way of California.

I’ve decided to start featuring these cookbooks, or at least their better recipes, for Texas Independence Day. March in Central Texas is a good time for celebrating outdoors—usually. Unless there’s a polar vortex rolling through, it’s cool but not cold, and neither dry nor humid.

One of the cookbooks I would have liked to feature earlier is the 1975 Potter County Home Demonstration Council Bicentennial Cook Book, published to coincide with the American Bicentennial. I acquired this cookbook too late for it to go into my Sestercentennial series’ inaugural entry, A Bicentennial Meal for the Sestercentennial, and that’s too bad, because it’s a very nice book. Lily Ward’s Potato Chip Cookies were the best of the three potato chip cookies I featured in last year’s National Potato Day cookie post. They were so good, I included them among the three treats I mailed out to friends over Christmas.

Mrs. C.D. Baldwin’s Hawaiian Fudge is also the inspiration for my own Les Johnson’s Antimatter Creams. It would never have occurred to me that you could heat fresh banana to 240° without harming it if I hadn’t made her pineapple fudge. Both pineapple and banana are great additions to a nut fudge. The added green food coloring, however, was only really appropriate for the radioactive variant.

“How To Enjoy Greater Satisfaction From Your Refrigerator”

Like Montgomery Ward’s 1942 Cold Cooking, the Borg-Warner Corporation’s 1947 Norge Cold Cookery and Recipe Digest (PDF File, 10.2 MB) is marketed towards owners and potential owners of the company’s refrigerator. It’s not just a manual, but a cookbook full of reasons to use the product. While Borg-Warner was headquartered in Detroit, the Norge plant, according to this book, was across the state in Muskegon. Borg-Warner still exists; Norge long since hasn’t, although they seem to have continued in some form, probably in-name-only, up to 2006.

This is the third in a series about the first decades of the home refrigeration revolution. While I won’t be going past 1947 I will fill in some of the gaps between 1928 and 1947 with at least two more posts over the coming year. Here’s the series so far:

1. Frigidaire, 1928
2. Cold Cooking, 1942
3. Cold Cookery, 1947 <-

The first part of Cold Cookery extols the wonders of the Norge “Rollator” refrigerator. It describes how to maintain the appliance and outlines how to use it: which shelves to store which kinds of food on, how to adjust the dial for freezing times, that sort of thing. The freezer section of this 1947 refrigerator was still tiny, though it did have a separate set of freezer shelves for ice cubes and frozen desserts in addition to the main freezer box.

It’s interesting what foods they considered important enough to mention. There’s a “double-width” storage space especially for “long stalk celery” and “rhubarb”. Rhubarb is one of my favorite hard-to-find items nowadays.

Translation: “Keep an eye on parked cars, and use your bell to be noticed.” This should not be controversial, although I might quibble with the bell.

I’ve been reading Il Post lately, both to improve my very bad Italian and to gain a non-American, non-English perspective on the news of the day. Yet somehow I missed this article about a “scandal” in Lombardy until a friend brought it to my attention with the comment “This is funny.”

It is funny, and a very good example of why I avoid social media. In a virtual environment we lose any sense of reality. In this case, it appears that a local government was actually doing something substantive to keep pedestrians and bicyclists from being killed by inattentive drivers. It turned into a social media scandal because… it told people how to effectively stay alive rather than laying blame and letting them die!

I’m not going to translate the whole thing. It’s not worth the trouble and in any case my Italian is not up to the task. The title is The questionable campaign on street safety in Lombardy. The subtitle is:

È stata sospesa dopo molte critiche a un post che dava consigli ai pedoni per evitare di farsi investire, dando un po' l'impressione di colpevolizzarli

That is, in my rough Italian:

It [the safety program] was suspended after much criticism to a post that advised pedestrians on how to avoid getting hit, giving a bit of an impression of blaming them.

The thing is, that bit of blame is no more than saying that some pedestrians don’t pay attention to the possibility of dangerous drivers when using the street. I do a lot of walking when I travel, and this is demonstrably true. Judging from the campaign’s graphics, the campaign was not about assigning blame but about saving lives.

This is the semi-birthday of Dungeons & Dragons, to the extent that we can even know when the birthday was. It’s over fifty years old now, and we have already lost many of the pioneers of the game. Every year that goes by, we lose more pioneers and more players. With them go what in business we’d call the “institutional knowledge” they carried. That knowledge isn’t just about rules and rulesets, but about why these rules and rulesets were created. It’s not about a particular game but about the whole milieu in which the game was created.

I wrote about how the way that fans and readers interacted influenced early games in On a Cult of Gygax. But just as important is how and why the entrepreneurs did what they did. Take the best of today’s creators, your-favorite-osr-creator-here, and even if they never created their product they’d still be able to game. They could still play Dungeons & Dragons, or Traveller, or Tunnels & Trolls, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or Villains & Vigilantes… the list goes on, and what each of those games have in common is that if their creators had never created those games, their creators would never have been able to play.

Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, Mark Millar, and even Ken St. Andre, were creating games not to market them but because they couldn’t play that kind of game without creating the game first. They were players before they were businessmen—and it showed in everything from how they marketed the game (marketing often came after playing) and in how they talked about the game.

It’s very strange to me, having grown up soaking in the free-form rules style of AD&D play, how attached some players are to a Cult of the Cult of Gygax™; and to complaining about a supposed hardline by TSR against house rules. My memory of that period, at least through the late eighties, is one of “make it your own”, advice straight from the rule books and from outlets such as The Dragon.

We always knew that Gygax and other TSR luminaries used different rules. And it made sense for them to do so even outside of a “make it your own” mentality: where could we expect new rules to come from, if not from the campaigns of the author and other employees at TSR? We assumed, and it appears to be true, that the people at TSR were gamers, that they played the game, too.

Which makes questions and answers like this one from Polyhedron far more understandable to me than to adherents of the Cult of the Cult of Gygax™.

I completed three food-related publishing projects this year. First, in July, I published the second edition of Tempt Them with Tastier Foods, my collection of recipes from Chicago’s television chef and IGA icon, Eddie Doucette. It includes an interview with his son, which I expanded for a more detailed post in September, He was the chef.

In August, I published my own personal cookbook, A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book. It’s a compilation of recipes that I used to save by way of photographing them with my phone so as to have them available while traveling. It’s a lot easier to access now that they’re in PDF, ePub, and print form.

And finally, in October I started publishing facsimiles of the vintage cookbook pamphlets I’ve been writing about. The first to get this treatment was The Horsford Cook Book from 1877 or so. Also available: Mrs. Winston’s Receipts for 1876 and the ca. 1880 New Centennial Cook Book.

For the moment I’m only doing this for works from 1929 and earlier¹. But that leaves many more to come in 2025 and up, so stay tuned to the food section of Mimsy Were the Borogoves or The Padgett Sunday Supper Club.

I continued preparing for the sestercentennial this year with a collection of 1876 recipes from a handful of cookbooks celebrating or benefiting from America’s centennial. I cannot overstate how much I recommend surprising your family and friends with a mashed potato pie in place of the more traditional sweet potato pie. There are a lot of dishes that have disappeared into our history that deserve restoration, and this is at the top of the list for me.

I also managed to restart my refrigerator cookbook revisited history survey with Montgomery Ward Cold Cooking from 1942. The Norge Cold Cookery and Recipe Digest from 1947 is coming soon, and I have a few more tidbits up my sleeve to round out that trilogy.

The year started with an amazing collection of books from a trip to San Diego. I have so many books in my to-read pile that I don’t travel for book sales anymore, but if a book sale happens to be where I’m traveling… In San Diego I hit the La Playa Bookstore remodeling sale and the University Heights Library Sale. I also visited Verbatim Books, the Mission Hills Library Store, and Grace’s Book Nook. And of course I stopped at Coas in Las Cruces on the way out.

For a blackjack total of 21 books. Thongor in the City of Magicians, from Coas, kept me in reading material through New Mexico and Arizona. Post Captain, The John Wayne Code, Gracie: A Love Story, Lights Out, The Pope Benedict XVI Reader, Stella Fregelius, In Trump Time, Cyrano de Bergerac…

“This plus your regular class load should turn your brain to tapioca in less than a month.”

I’ll have more to say about tapioca when I get to 2024’s Year in Food.

We have just entered the second quarter of the 2000s, well past the years that The Running Man was set in. Just before Thanksgiving I happened to watch both Network and Running Man back to back. The only reason for this juxtaposition was that they were both “movies my dad might enjoy”—which he did. But watching them together over two nights like that, one of the things that struck me is that The Running Man could literally be a sequel to Network. Both are about the entertainmentication of the modern world, both feature television executives obsessed with viewing shares, both use violent criminals to achieve winning shares and increase already-winning shares, both are very much about the merging of autocratic government and a compliant news industry. Both are about the merging of news and government with entertainment.

In Network Faye Dunaway’s up-and-coming television exec successfully develops a series about armed bank robbers and murderers acting under cover of political activism. We never do find out what her heiress-kidnapping Liberation Army show is called. Someone jokingly referred to it as “The Mao-Tse Tung Hour” early in development and that’s what the executives and development team keep calling it through the rest of the movie.

The Running Man was much less expertly filmed than Network, especially when it came to cutting it for theaters. We can still see bits remaining of subplots or subcurrents that were removed late in editing or so late during production that related scenes couldn’t be altered.

Maria Conchita Alonso’s Amber was clearly being set up for a tense scene at the end in which she would have trouble remembering the uplink code for the broadcast network, something that needed exact timing as the revolution’s strike team took over the broadcast control room. They cut the remembering scene but not the memorization scene—the latter was necessary to explain Harold Weiss’s disappearance.

Cutting that scene was a surprisingly smart choice for a B-level action movie like The Running Man. It’s such a cliched bit that it mostly only works in comedies today, Army of Darkness being the most iconic but still evident in the modern century in movies like Scoop.

A more interesting cut is possibly Captain Freedom’s awakening. His speech at the end about a “Code of the Gladiators” comes mostly out of nowhere. It looks a lot like the culmination of a character growth that never actually happened. When we first see Captain Freedom, he’s a joke, almost literally a white Bojangles prancing across the screen to promote his parodic exercise show.

Are you ready for pain? Are you ready for suffering? If the answer is yes, then you’re ready for Captain Freedom’s Workout.

Also available in print.

Merry Christmas! As we move closer and closer to the sestercentennial in 2026, here’s a centennial-adjacent cookbook from 1876. While Mrs. Winslow’s Domestic Receipt Book for 1876 (PDF File, 5.1 MB) was, obviously, designed specifically for 1876, it had nothing to do with the Centennial. It was, ostensibly at least, an almanac. So there was one for every year, including 1876.

“Mrs. Winslow” was not selling a baking product. “Mrs. Winslow’s” had been putting out Receipt Books every year since at least 1863, in the service of selling Brown’s Bronchial Troches¹ and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. They’re often classified as quack medicines but I’m not sure that they’re “quack” in the normal sense of the word. Judging from the ingredients and the advertisements in this pamphlet, they did what they were advertised to do.

Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup may not have been the best idea for quieting children suffering “the excruciating pain of Cutting Teeth”, but it probably did reduce the pain: it contained morphine. Most of the adult medicines promise to relieve coughs and sore throats, which they probably did. The products advertised in these almanacs, at least, do not appear to have promised a cure of the underlying ailment, only a refuge from the symptoms. Given the state of medicine at the time, they may even not have been the worst of contemporary methods of relieving such ailments.